A Professor of Nuclear Engineering at Purdue University, Rusi Taleyarkhan, was found guilty of research misconduct as he falsified his research record, a Purdue review board announced. The highly controversial scientist, who worked as a Distinguished Scientist at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, alleged that he obtained nuclear fusion using a tabletop ultrasound device. However, no real evidence of his allegations was ever found by experts in the field.

While the panel cannot actually prove that he falsely claimed to have obtained sonofusion or bubble fusion (as the process of achieving nuclear fusion by bombarding a liquid with strong ultrasonic waves is called), it could in fact prove that he falsely claimed that other researchers independently reproduced his findings. This means that, most probably, the alleged tabletop nuclear fusion never took place.

Thus, six years after the original claims, Rusi Taleyarkhan was found guilty of misleading the scientific community that others achieved similar results. His unscrupulous actions also caused a lot of money to be wasted in attempting to replicate the results, a large portion of which came from federal grants. His first paper on the subject of sonoluminescence and sonofusion was published in 2002 in Science, despite heavy opposition from several reviewers.

Subsequently, his postdoctoral fellow Yiban Xu tried to publish another paper on the subject, which was to add credibility to the 2002 claims, but was rejected by Science. To help with the appearance of scientific collaboration, they decided to add the name of master's candidate Adam Butt to the paper and submitted it to the journal Nuclear Engineering and Design, with heavy revisions by Rusi Taleyarkhan, even though Butt did not actually participate in the research. The paper was published without mentioning Taleyarkhan, which enabled the latter to claim in 2006 that his work was independently verified, even though he was the de facto author of both papers.

Ken Suslick, a professor of chemistry, materials science and engineering at the University of Illinois at Champaign, was one of the reviewers who opposed publishing the 2002 paper in Science. He told the Chicago Tribune that the original paper contained substandard research, but that Taleyarkhan's subsequent efforts to buttress the findings led to the actual misconduct. His opinion was echoed by other scientists as well.

We might never know whether Rusi Taleyarkhan actually achieved fusion, but unfortunately due to his uninspired conduct he has lost any credibility within the scientific community and his career is effectively ruined.